Samuel Coleridge - The Complete Essays, Lectures & Letters of S. T. Coleridge (Illustrated)

And as I looked now feels my soul creative throes,

And now all joy, all sense zerflows .

I do not know, whether I am in earnest or in sport while I recommend this ver and zer ; that is, I cannot be sure whether I feel, myself, anything ridiculous in the idea, or whether the feeling that seems to imply this be not the effect of my anticipation of and sympathy with the ridicule of, perhaps, all my readers.

THE LOVER'S HUMILITY

To you there are many like me, yet to me there is none like you, and you are always like yourself. There are groves of night-flowers, yet the night-flower sees only the moon.

Table of Contents

1808-1809

Yea, oft alone,

Piercing the long-neglected holy cave

The haunt obscure of old Philosophy,

He bade with lifted torch its starry walls

Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame

Of odorous lamps tended by Saint and Sage.

S. T. C.

INOPEM ME COPIA FECIT

If one thought leads to another, so often does it blot out another. This I find when having lain musing on my sofa, a number of interesting thoughts having suggested themselves, I conquer my bodily indolence, and rise to record them in these books, alas! my only confidants. The first thought leads me on indeed to new ones; but nothing but the faint memory of having had these remains of the other, which had been even more interesting to me. I do not know whether this be an idiosyncrasy, a peculiar disease, of my particular memory—but so it is with me —my thoughts crowd each other to death.

A NEUTRAL PRONOUN

Quære—whether we may not, nay ought not, to use a neutral pronoun relative, or representative, to the word "Person," where it hath been used in the sense of homo , mensch , or noun of the common gender, in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently? If this be incorrect in syntax, the whole use of the word Person is lost in a number of instances, or only retained by some stiff and strange position of words, as—"not letting the person be aware, wherein offence has been given "—instead of—"wherein he or she has offended." In my [judgment] both the specific intention and general etymon of "Person" in such sentences, fully authorise the use of it and which instead of he, she, him, her, who, whom.

THE HUMBLE COMPLAINT OF THE LOVER

If love be the genial sun of human nature, unkindly has he divided his rays [in acting] on me and my beloved! On her hath he poured all his light and splendour, and my being doth he permeate with his invisible rays of heat alone. She shines and is cold like the tropic fire-fly—I, dark and uncomely, would better resemble the cricket in hot ashes. My soul, at least, might be considered as a cricket eradiating the heat which gradually cinerising the heart produces the embers and ashes from among which it chirps out of its hiding-place.

N.B.—This put in simple and elegant verse, [would pass] as an imitation of Marini, and of too large a part of the madrigals of Guarini himself.

TRUTH

Truth per se is like unto quicksilver, bright, agile, harmless. Swallow a pound and it will run through unaltered and only, perhaps, by its weight force down impurities from out the system. But mix and comminute it by the mineral acid of spite and bigotry, and even truth becomes a deadly poison—medicinal only when some other, yet deadlier, lurks in the bones.

LOVE THE INEFFABLE

O! many, many are the seeings, hearings, of pure love that have a being of their own, and to call them by the names of things unsouled and debased below even their own lowest nature by associations accidental, and of vicious accidents, is blasphemy . What seest thou yonder? The lovely countenance of a lovely maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering with devotion—her face resigned to bliss or bale; or a bit of flesh ; or, rather, that which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is more than an act of mere sight—that which refuses all words, because words being, perforce, generalities do not awake, but really involve associations of other words as well as other thoughts—but that which I see, must be felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self! What! shall the statuary Pygmalion of necessity feel this for every part of the insensate marble, and shall the lover Pygmalion in contemplating the living statue, the heart-adored maiden, breathing forth in every look, every movement, the genial life imbreathed of God, grovel in the mire and grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the Circe, of vulgar generality and still more vulgar association? The Polyclete that created the Aphrodite καλλιπυγος, thought in acts, not words—energy divinely languageless— δια τον Λογον, ου συν επεσι, through the Word, not with words . And what though it met with Imp-fathers and Imp-mothers and Fiendsips at its christening in ts parents' absence!

THE MANUFACTURE OF PROPHESY

One of the causes of superstition, and also of enthusiasm, and, indeed, of all errors in matters of fact, is the great power with which the effect acts upon and modifies the remembrance of its cause, at times even transforming it in the mind. Let A have said a few words to B , which (by some change and accommodation of them to the event in the mind of B ) have been remarkably fulfilled; and let B remind A of these words which he ( A ) had spoken, A will instantly forget all his mood, motive, and meaning, at the time of speaking them, nay, remember words he had never spoken, and throw back upon them, from the immediate event, an imagined fulfillment, a prophetic grandeur—himself, in his own faith, a seer of no small inspiration. We yet want the growth of a prophet and self-deceived wonder-worker step by step , through all the stages; and, yet, what ample materials exist for a true and nobly-minded psychologist! For, in order to make fit use of these materials, he must love and honour as well as understand human nature—rather, he must love in order to understand it.

THE CAPTIVE BIRD May 16th, 1808

O that sweet bird! where is it? It is encaged somewhere out of sight; but from my bedroom at the Courier office, from the windows of which I look out on the walls of the Lyceum, I hear it at early dawn, often, alas! lulling me to late sleep—again when I awake and all day long. It is in prison, all its instincts ungratified, yet it feels the influence of spring, and calls with unceasing melody to the Loves that dwell in field and greenwood bowers, unconscious, perhaps, that it calls in vain. O are they the songs of a happy, enduring day-dream? Has the bird hope? or does it abandon itself to the joy of its frame, a living harp of Eolus? O that I could do so!

Assuredly a thrush or blackbird encaged in London is a far less shocking spectacle, its encagement a more venial defect of just feeling, than (which yet one so often sees) a bird in a gay cage in the heart of the country—yea, as if at once to mock both the poor prisoner and its kind mother, Nature—in a cage hung up in a tree, where the free birds after a while, when the gaudy dungeon is no longer a scare, crowd to it, perch on the wires, drink the water, and peck up the seeds. But of all birds I most detest to see the nightingale encaged, and the swallow, and the cuckoo. Motiveless! monstrous! But the robin! O woes' woe! woe!—he, sweet cock-my-head-and-eye, pert-bashful darling, that makes our kitchen its chosen cage.

ARCHITECTURE AND CLIMATE

If we take into consideration the effect of the climates of the North, Gothic , in contra-distinction to Greek and Græco-Roman architecture, is rightly so named. Take, for instance, a rainy, windy day, or sleet, or a fall of snow, or an icicle-hanging frost, and then compare the total effect of the South European roundnesses and smooth perpendicular surface with the ever-varying angles and meeting-lines of the North-European or Gothic styles.